Creativity and our digital selves

I am grateful to have the opportunity to continue exchanging ideas with IMT Business School staff and students. 

This time, masters students from there visited Royal Holloway and I could give them a bit of a tour guide as well as continue encouraging to pursue their creativity.  I would like to thank my collaborators Maria Alejandra, Diego Martinez-Castro and Xiaouyu Zhang (Kevin), with whom we ran a very engaging workshop for these students.

It was challenging to pitch a session for an audience who combines studying and working on a weekly basis.  Creativity offers though the possibility of reflecting how work offers opportunities for self -realization, and how challenges and skills need to be carefully managed by ourselves and our bosses at work to keep creativity alive and flourishing. 

To achieve this requires courage, as our systemic thinker Russ Ackoff always said. Courage to ask for what we need, and to place ourselves in appropriate and supportive working environments.  Courage to acknowledge our skills and limitations, and seek challenges appropriate to our current situation and values. And courage to keep trying, to stand up for what we believe, and follow our own path even if that is not what our loved ones want for us.   

After we touched on the individual and work dimensions of creativity, we ventured in proposing to our students a number of challenges related to what we called 'our digital selves'.  Increasingly, we as individuals are nudged to present and manage our online identities and other footprints of our lives, often to our dislike.  Under the idea that this could help us improve our opportunities in life, we are now part of many online outlets.  

Diverging in formulating several possibilities before deciding

I then proposed to students to form groups and address one of three challenges: a) supporting university students having mental health problems (a worrying trend in the UK), b) protecting households data from unwanted use by utility service providers (related to Kevin's research), and c) helping marginalised communities preserve their memories through digital (potentially related to Diego's research).  They were to draw a storyboard explaining their solution. 

For a variety of reasons, students chose to address the first of the above challenge.  It might have been that they felt a degree of connection to it, or that they considered the other two 'too technical'.  In their choice there was discussion.   We then asked students to elaborate a storyboard of a digital solution which they thought could help them address the challenge.  And I encouraged them to think not only in an app as an innovation. 

A combined app and device

Students came up with very sensitive and thoughtful proposals.   As seen in this picture on the left, someone with a mental health condition could be supported by a digital innovation (app and device called buddy) that records her moods and provides options for sharing / not sharing this information with relevant others, also depending on circumstances. It was also interesting to see that the device might not be a mobile phone.  

IMT students presenting their work

Through the presentations and short discussion afterwards, I noticed that these students were very open in considering either/or possibilities.  With this exercise, many of them valued the  opportunity to reflect on their own careers, as well as finding bit more about what the world of work or research has to offer in the near future.   A key insight that could be drawn for me is that we could use our creativity to better shape the ways in which we want to see our selves in the digital world and work with others in doing so.

It seems that with the right learning environment and activities, we can encourage our students to be thoughtful and creative.   Thank you for visiting us and for venturing to explore your own creativity!

Student Elise Deffain from IMT